The Faith History Behind Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is, at its root, a religious act. The holiday Americans keep on the fourth Thursday of November grows directly out of Christian faith: the 1621 harvest feast shared by the Pilgrims of Plymouth and their Wampanoag neighbors, the Separatist conviction that every good harvest was a gift from God, the colonial and national days set aside for prayer and thanks, and Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation) that made a yearly Thanksgiving a national institution in explicitly biblical language. Strip away the football and the turkey and what remains is the oldest impulse behind the day: giving thanks to God. This is the faith history behind America's favorite feast.

At a Glance

• The Pilgrims who held the 1621 harvest feast at Plymouth were English Separatists, Christians who had broken entirely from the Church of England to worship as they believed Scripture required.
• The three-day gathering in the autumn of 1621 was a harvest celebration shared by roughly 50 surviving colonists and about 90 Wampanoag led by the sachem Massasoit, described in Edward Winslow's firsthand account.
• For the Pilgrims, a formal "day of thanksgiving" was a religious observance of prayer and praise to God, distinct from a harvest feast, and they kept both.
• President George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation under the Constitution on October 3, 1789, calling Americans to acknowledge "the providence of Almighty God."
• Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving on October 3, 1863, fixing it on the last Thursday of November and addressing it to "our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."
• Congress set the date on the fourth Thursday of November in 1941, where it has remained ever since.

What Are the Christian Roots of Thanksgiving?

The habit of pausing to thank God for a harvest is older than America and older than the Pilgrims. It runs straight back through the Bible, where the people of Israel were commanded to keep the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the harvest and to bring the firstfruits of the land with gratitude. The Psalms return to the theme again and again: "O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever" (Psalm 107:1). Giving thanks was not an add-on to Israel's faith. It was one of its central acts of worship.

The English Christians who settled New England carried that instinct across the Atlantic. In their world, a good harvest was never taken for granted as a lucky outcome of weather and labor. It was received as a direct gift from the hand of a providing God, and the right response was public thanks. That conviction, more than any single meal, is the true root of the American holiday. The through-line from the Bible to the Plymouth table to the modern fourth Thursday of November is a single, simple idea: that gratitude is owed, and owed to God.

Who Were the Pilgrims and What Did They Believe?

The Pilgrims were not the same as the Puritans who would later flood into Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans wanted to reform the Church of England from within, to purify it. The Pilgrims had given up on that project. They were Separatists, a small and persecuted group who concluded that the established church was so corrupted that faithful Christians had to leave it entirely and form their own congregations, answerable to God and Scripture alone.

That decision was dangerous. Separatism was illegal in England, and members of the congregation that would become the Pilgrims were harassed, fined, and jailed. Around 1608 they fled to the Netherlands for the freedom to worship as they believed they must. After more than a decade in exile, worried that their children were losing their English identity and hungry for a place to build a godly community of their own, part of the congregation sailed for America aboard the Mayflower in 1620. Their governor and historian, William Bradford, later wrote that they knew they were "pilgrims" on the earth, borrowing the language of Hebrews 11:13, where the faithful confess themselves "strangers and pilgrims" looking for a better country.

Before they even went ashore, the men aboard the ship signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement that opened by declaring their voyage had been undertaken "for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith." Faith was not one motive among many for these settlers. It was the reason they had crossed the ocean at all.

What Happened at the 1621 Harvest Feast?

The first winter at Plymouth was brutal. Roughly half of the little colony died of sickness, cold, and hunger before spring. The survivors owed their lives in large part to the help of the Wampanoag, and especially to Tisquantum, known as Squanto, who taught them how to plant corn and where to fish. When the autumn of 1621 brought in a successful harvest, the colonists set aside time to celebrate.

The clearest firsthand account comes from Edward Winslow, one of the colony's leaders, in a letter later published in the pamphlet known as Mourt's Relation. He describes the governor sending men out fowling so the company could "after a special manner rejoice together" once the harvest was gathered, and he records that the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit came with about ninety of his men, staying three days and contributing five deer to the gathering. Roughly fifty colonists had survived to share it. There was no mention of turkey by name, no pumpkin pie, and no one at the time called it "the first Thanksgiving." It was a harvest celebration, rich with food and gratitude, between two peoples who had kept each other alive.

For the deeply religious Pilgrims, this feast and a formal day of thanksgiving were not quite the same thing. A true "day of thanksgiving" in their practice was a solemn religious event, a day of prayer and praise set aside to thank God for a specific mercy, closer to a worship service than a banquet. The colony kept such a day in 1623 after a providential rain broke a threatening drought and saved the crops. The holiday Americans now celebrate blends both streams, the harvest feast and the day of thanks, into one.

How Did Thanksgiving Become a National Holiday?

For a long time, thanksgiving in America was a local and occasional affair. Individual colonies, and later states, would declare days of thanksgiving to mark good harvests, military victories, or answered prayers, usually at the request of a governor or a minister. There was no single national date and no guarantee the day would be kept at all.

The first national Thanksgiving under the new Constitution came from George Washington. At the request of Congress, he issued a proclamation on October 3, 1789, setting aside Thursday, November 26, as "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer." Its opening words made the point plainly: "it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor." Even so, the observance remained irregular for decades, celebrated in some states and ignored in others.

The person most responsible for making Thanksgiving a fixed annual holiday was not a president but a magazine editor, Sarah Josepha Hale, who campaigned for the cause through letters and editorials for more than fifteen years. Her story, and the tangled path the date took afterward, is told in full in our companion piece on the faith behind America's favorite feast. The breakthrough she had worked toward finally came from Abraham Lincoln.

What Did Lincoln's 1863 Proclamation Say?

By the autumn of 1863 the Civil War had already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and the outcome was still uncertain. It was in that darkness, not in a season of easy prosperity, that Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation that established the modern national holiday. Dated October 3, 1863, and drafted with the help of Secretary of State William Seward, it invited Americans to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving.

The language was openly and unmistakably religious. Lincoln began by noting that the year had been "filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies," and he insisted these were not the nation's own doing: "No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God." He called on his fellow citizens "to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." And he did not stop at gratitude. He asked Americans to commend to God's care "all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers" in the war and to "fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation."

That proclamation set the pattern the country has followed ever since. Every president after Lincoln continued the annual custom, and in 1941 Congress passed a joint resolution fixing the holiday on the fourth Thursday of November, giving Thanksgiving the permanent legal date it holds today.

What Does Thanksgiving Mean for Christians Today?

For Christians, Thanksgiving is one of the few remaining national holidays whose very name is a spiritual act. The day does not ask what you are thankful for in the abstract. In its origins it names the one being thanked. From the Pilgrims kneeling in a hard-won harvest to Lincoln calling a grieving nation to praise, the American tradition has understood gratitude as something directed upward, to the God who gives the fruitful fields and the healthful skies.

That makes Thanksgiving a natural companion to the other days on which Americans have woven faith into public life, from the prayer folded into the Pledge of Allegiance to the quiet reverence behind how the nation honors its veterans. Thanksgiving belongs to that same thread, the long braid of faith and the life of the nation that runs through the American story.

You do not need a historical reenactment to keep the day well. Before the meal, name the blessings of the year out loud and give thanks for them. Remember, as Lincoln did, the mourners and the sufferers, and pray for them. Gather people who might otherwise be alone. The turkey and the football are fine, but they are not the point. The point is the act the holiday is named for, giving thanks to God, an act older than the country and, for the Pilgrims who started it, the whole reason they had come.